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Designing streets to help drunks home

IF YOU’VE ever been part of a crowd spilling out of a late-night bar, you’ll be familiar with scenes of drunk people staggering around, the arguments breaking out, not to mention the occasional violent brawl.

Now a model that mimics the movements of drunken crowds might help find ways to design streets so that they direct late-night revellers safely home to their beds rather than into the path of potential conflict.

Simon Moore at the University of Cardiff in the UK and his colleagues wondered how the staggering gait and loss of balance associated with being drunk would affect a …